


when the wind whistles through the trees like waves

by randomlyimagine



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Animal Transformation, Attempted Experimentation, Attempted manipulation, Attempts to steal Yennefer's skin obviously, BAMF Yennefer of Vengerberg, Kinda, Minor Character Death, Misunderstandings, Multi, Selkie!Yennefer, Selkies, Yennefer's struggles with vulnerability, Yennefer-centric, and some surprises in there too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29224590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomlyimagine/pseuds/randomlyimagine
Summary: Yennefer is born wet, squalling, soft, and fuzzy: a tiny baby seal with near-black fur and impossible violet eyes.-A zing of chaos startles Yennefer into wakefulness—and dread. She knows that flavor of chaos, that particular scent, and the way it comes from the bracelet that she never takes off of her wrist. It's a warning that someone has broken into her safehouse—that someone is trying to steal her skin.
Relationships: Minor Geralt/Jaskier, Past Yennefer/Geralt - Relationship
Comments: 9
Kudos: 44





	when the wind whistles through the trees like waves

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a quick weekend project, and it really wasn't, but that doesn't matter because I'm very happy with the way it turned out.
> 
> Thanks to the witcher femslash server for the cheerleading and to thesvnwillrise for such excellent beta work!

Yennefer is born wet, squalling, soft, and fuzzy: a tiny baby seal with near-black fur and impossible violet eyes.

Her mother loves her as soon as she sees her—born in seal form, already able to swim, so much stronger than she would be if she took off her coat and slipped into human form. Not that she could, as a newborn babe, but her mother still thinks of it wistfully—what it would be like to cradle the human version of her daughter, so tiny and trusting and helpless.

Yennefer’s so-called father does not love her. He stares into her violet eyes and _hates_.

And it is no wonder, for he is a hateful man—and he knows that Yennefer’s mother had conceived Yennefer with another, and that everyone else knows it too.

His hatred only goes stronger as the years pass, as Yennefer grows older. She learns to shed her sealskin, and her human form could not look less like his. Her eyes are a color not found in any pureblooded selkie, ever, and they do not change, as human infants’ often do. And as she grows, her spine grows twisted, her snout and flippers uneven, and her father’s scorn grows yet again.

Yennefer’s mother tries to protect her daughter—but she doesn’t try hard enough. And as the years go on, as the fish grow scarce and the humans encroach and her daughter is beaten and she herself is shamed over and over for her _deviancy_ in laying with a landdweller… That protection grows weaker and weaker.

At age sixteen, Yennefer runs away. Or, to be literal, to avoid human idiom…she swims away. Straight for the shore.

She sheds her skin and never looks back.

\--

Human society, Yennefer quickly finds, is much more difficult to navigate in the long term than it is for a short trip, one guided—by _some_ definition of the word, anyway—by the adults in her pod.

But those adults were always losing her, on accident or on purpose. This is not the first time Yennefer has had to make her own way.

And make her way she does, somehow—quiet and hungry and grasping for everything she can find. Guarding her coat with more than her life. It’s not an easy life, but it’s _enough_ , it’s _away from her father_ , and her mother, who stopped defending her, and all the others in her former pod, the ones who scorned and beat her. And that’s all that matters.

Her life is more pleasant than it’s been in years. Even in this world of strangers, of _humans_ —and all the hidden, scattered others they oppress—she feels safer than she has in years.

But the land is not kind, no more than the sea. And so it is a few months into her new life that Yennefer leaves town and makes her way back to her hideout in the forest, the one where she’s hidden her food and her meager possessions and most of all her sealskin—

The sword is at her throat before she can try anything.

Bandits. They’d seen her, they jeer. “Look what I found!” One jeers, when they stumble upon her in the woods. “Strange little girl, all on her own.”

“Strange little girl with _very_ nice boots,” another bandit adds.

They are nice boots, but then, most boots are, in Yennefer’s admittedly lacking experience with having feet.

“Boots far too nice for a little peasant girl,” the man sneers, and Yennefer’s heart is in her throat, “so what are you: a thief, or a noble too stupid to finish their disguise.”

Yennefer laughs, involuntarily, at the absurdity. _Her, a noble_. Then the sword grazes her skin and the sound dies in her throat.

She’d stolen the boots from a traveling merchant mere days before.

“Either way, bet you’ve got some other goods back there,” the man threatening her says, and he may be charged with holding her at sword point, but his gaze is roving to the large, underground hollow in which she’d hidden all her worldly possessions, the way the men are ducking under the roots of the tree that had sheltered her, and anticipation is keen in his eyes.

One of the men under her tree is holding her pelt. She can’t see it, but she can feel his slimy fingers against her coat, oily phantoms on her human skin.

“C’mon kid,” the man jeers. “We’ll leave you a crust of bread after we take all the good shit. Hey, Mladen! What else is in there?”

A deep, angry snarl from within her hideout. “Nothing.”

The man’s brow furrows and his sword drifts a few inches farther from her neck, but Yennefer barely notices. She has never had her skin touched against her will before—no selkie would try, not even the piece of shit who’d been married to her mother.

“Just this, some shit, and some shit food,” someone says, and then he walks out, and he is holding her skin.

The sword is still so close, but Yennefer doesn’t care—she lunges forward, arms grasping for her skin as she snarls and snaps and bites down on the other man’s arm like is a large and unpleasant fish.

But the man is much, much bigger than a fish, and as he yells, he smacks her to the ground. She barely manages to hold onto her pelt, clutches in tight to her chest, they will have to _kill_ her before they take it and gods they are probably going to, but she wants to _live_ —

Then the yelling goes quiet, and so does the unsheathing of swords. Yennefer opens her eyes to find a dark cave and a teenage boy. He says that his name is Istredd. He says that he wants to send her back, but Yennefer tells him that will mean her death, so he sends her somewhere else—somewhere close by.

Yennefer vanishes through his portal with her peasant rags, her fancy boots, her skin, and herself. That’s all she has in the world, and all she has when she is found, just hours later, by the Rectoress of Aretuza.

\--

Aretuza is cruel and painful and hard to survive—it’s much like the world, that way. But unlike in the sea, unlike any other place on land, at Aretuza, Yennefer has a chance to be _seen_.

She fights her way through mastering a magic that does not come naturally to her; for all that selkies are creatures of chaos, they cannot manipulate it. No, her magic, if indeed it was inherited, comes from her _other_ side.

Yennefer has always despised having to keep herself controlled—but it’s easier every day, with the constant pressure of keeping her true nature a secret. All of the other students, the professors, everyone but the rectoress—they all think her human.

Yennefer hides her sealskin under her bed. Spells it with traps two dozen deep, as soon as she learns how.

And as soon as she is advanced enough, as soon as she is sure that she has the spells down _absolutely perfect_ , she protects it even better—protects _herself_. Makes it so she’ll never, ever have to feel another’s hands on it, ever again.

And so she survives Aretuza: she keeps secrets and pushes her friend into a pool of eels, learns to love Istredd and to manipulate him in turns.

Which is, ultimately, where it all goes wrong.

\--

She tells Istredd that she’s a selkie, one with Elder blood—quarter-elf, on her father’s side.

It’s a moment of weakness. But she listens to him, hears him reassure her, and for once in her life she feels like vulnerability might be okay, might be _worth it_.

Then she is told she is going to Nilfgaard. Because Cintra would never stand for a nonhuman in the court of their biggest trading partner. Because Istredd _told them_ —and now her true nature, her foolish trust, is being used to bar her from the very thing she wants most.

(But of course, it could be used for much, much worse, and that thought becomes another thing that leaves her thrashing in the night and startled out of sleep.)

Yennefer can’t take back trust ill given. But there are something things she can control, and by the gods she _will_.

Yennefer tricks her way into Aedirn and tells them to cut out her womb and leaves for court determined that she will never, _ever_ let herself be so foolish again.

\--

In Rinde, there is a witcher, a bard, and a djinn.

By that point, Yennefer hasn’t worn her coat in years and years and years. Not since the first month after she left the sea and walked far, far away from its shore.

Some deep, inhuman part of her still yearns for the sea sometimes—when the night is dark and clear, when the wind whistles through the trees like waves, whenever she submerges herself in water.

She fights that pathetic part of her into submission, and pushes it down as far as she can.

The witcher doesn’t notice her distraction when she sinks into the bath, or if he does, he brushes it off. Assumes it’s a reaction to his remarks about whatever physical _ailment_ she’d had, once.

Sometimes, Yennefer can still feel the ache of her twisted spine, the shortness of breath in lungs far too compressed. She smiles, half-bitter, and asks if other women find such coarseness charming.

And then she does what she always does, when someone gets too close to seeing her: She strikes out. With words, this time, but Yennefer has had to learn that sometimes words are enough. Humans aren’t supposed to go around biting people—more’s the shame.

\--

A zing of chaos startles Yennefer into wakefulness—and dread. She knows that flavor of chaos, that particular scent, and worst of all, the way it comes from the bracelet that she never takes off of her wrist, near-black, with no closure, and adorned with two prismatic beads, each made of dark purple glass.

The first bead carries a warning—makes sure Yennefer knows if there is ever a danger to her sealskin. And that is the one that is currently emanating chaos, and _that_ means that someone has broken into her safehouse—is trying to steal her skin.

Yennefer does not let herself panic. She is no longer that scared little girl, crooked and alone and held at the point of a sword. And because she is no longer that little girl, it’s the work of a moment to magic herself clothes, grab an elder blood flower, and portal out.

\--

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?” Yennefer growls, glaring at the scene laid out before her: The ballroom of an old manor, once long since left to the sands of time—the lacquered wood floor is stained and filthy, the painted filigrees are faded and cracked. There is a small pile of broken, cloth-covered furniture in the far corner, some once magnificent stained-glass windows—and a large bookcase, shoved out of place to reveal a hidden door.

A door that Yennefer had—foolishly—not truly expected anyone to ever find. She’d wondered if she was being paranoid, when she’d laid trap after trap around the manor’s grounds, then illusions and misdirections stacked twenty high.

But clearly she was not being paranoid, given the _people_ laid out before her: the witcher and his fucking bard.

“Yen,” the witcher says, startled.

“ _Ugh_ ,” the bard groans—he may hate her less now that she and Geralt have broken up, and he’s with the witcher, but if he’s here, he must dislike her more than she thought. A _vexing_ miscalculation. “Was it too much to ask for you to not show up?”

Considering they’re the ones who broke into her safehouse, broke through dozens of illusions, found her hidden passage, and are all told trying to steal her skin? _Yes_. She sneers and turns to the witcher. “ _Well_?” she asks, eyebrow raised and gaze sharper than a knife.

“Hmm,” the witcher responds. Then, “How did you know we were here?”

Yennefer scoffs. “And here I thought it was _obvious_.”

“Well,” Jaskier starts, dramatics on full, _arrogant_ display, “perhaps if you’ve been reading entrails lately, but for those of us who aren’t horrid bog witches, I’m afraid you’ll have to explain.”

…Why has she never turned him into a newt, again?

“I think,” she says, striding forward as an edge of _predator_ seeps into her gait, “that you are the ones who need to explain yourselves. After all, I’m not the one trespassing.”

“…You’re not?” Geralt asks.

He sounds sincere enough—Yennefer could almost believe it.

Except that someone has built shields around his mind.

Because trying to control her through the djinn wasn’t enough. And to think she’d believed him that it _hadn’t_ been on purpose—more the fool she.

On the mountain, Yennefer had simply left; later, when she inevitably fucking ran into Geralt again, he had apologized, said the binding was an accident. Said that the wording was “I wish to keep her safe,” a wish intended for a single peril, then twisted by the djinn into a bond. And she’d _believed_ him—worse, _wanted_ to believe him, and so clearly let herself be deceived.

Now she sees that she was a fool not to pin him down and extract every detail from his pathetic, magic-resistant little brain—to not have avenged herself then and there.

This is what love is, when all is said and done: betrayal and control and lies. It is time she accepted that.

Yennefer keeps her eyes fixed on the witcher as she raises a hand, lets it gather with gray smoke and _power_ —even as the witcher’s eyes widen and he says her name in some pathetic mockery of surprise, even as the bard starts rambling about insane witches, even as the witcher goes for his sword, her eyes never stray.

And then the smoke around her hand flares and she musters her chaos and her will—and throws the witcher and his bard against the wall.

“Yen,” Geralt growls. His hand is wrapped around the handle of his sword, but he can’t move to draw it. His mistake, thinking he didn’t need to be faster. “What are you doing?”

Yennefer’s sneer deepens. “You’ve lost the right to call me that.”

“And you’ve lost the right to pin him to a wall!” Jaskier shouts. He, too, has shields around his mind—clearly, his coming here was no accident, either. “Not that…I happen to know that you were doing that, of course, because how would I know that! And anyway, you never had my permission to pin me to a wall, so really—”

Yennefer tightens the bonds around the bard’s chest until the air is forced out of his lungs.

Geralt strains at his own magical prison, fist clenching around his sword, but she has frozen his hands so he can’t draw it, nor use his Signs, and he is helpless.

“Stop!” Geralt demands, voice tight and raw. “What are you _doing_?”

“No more than the bard has brought on himself, being here.”

“Yennefer! Please!”

It’s a step in the right direction, she tells herself. That’s the only reason she gives in. Besides, it not like she was going to kill the bard—at least until she knew who had put them on the trail of her pelt, of course, because she has to keep herself safe, she _has_ to—but she’ll have more leverage if Geralt doesn’t know that.

“Fine,” she says, and with a flick of her hand, the invisible bonds slacken back to their original state.

“Fuck,” the bard wheezes the very instant he has the breath, “What the _fuck_ , I thought our banter was _amicable_ , you _insane_ —”

Yennefer’s hand is twitching before she realizes, ready to cut him off before he calls her what men, what humans, always have—

“Don’t!” Geralt shouts. “Leave him alone—coming here was my idea. I’m the one who made the wish. I’m the one you want.”

Yennefer inclines her head. “Very true, witcher.” He had apologized, but it was a lie—that much is clear. It was an attempt to control her all along—it’s as he admitted: coming for her pelt was _his_ idea.

So she turns to him and approaches—her bonds will hold, of that she is sure. “Here’s something else that’s true: You’re going to tell me _everything you know_.”

Geralt’s eyes flash, his face contorts—and his jaw sets. “I can’t.”

The denial _burns_.

“Oh, you _can’t_ ,” she sneers. “Well then. Let me _help you_.”

And she throws the full force of her mind against his shields.

Geralt jerks, head hitting the wall.

“Seriously,” Jaskier yells, “you’re not supposed to be _this_ mean!”

The shields around Geralt’s mind are strong. Professional quality, so to speak.

“Yen—” Geralt starts—then, catching her glare, “Yennefer. Please, this isn’t you.”

Yennefer hadn’t thought her sneer could deepen further. “Go on, witcher. Tell me _what I am_.”

“Better than this!”

“Better than what? Hurting those who come for me? Who would bind me? Who would take what is _mine_?”

“It’s not yours, Yen,” Geralt says through teeth gritted with pain. “You know why I’m here—and I’m sorry, but it’s not yours.”

Yennefer can’t help it—she laughs, full-throated and mean. “Oh, _really_. Who’s is it then, witcher? _Yours_?”

Geralt’s mouth turns down. “It belongs to the selkie you stole it from.”

Yennefer’s rage is already mounting higher in anticipation of his answer when his words register.

 _What_.

She eases up on the witcher’s mind, raises a brow, and refuses to let the restraints slacken even an inch. “The selkie. That I stole it from.”

“I don’t know what you plan to do with it,” Geralt is saying, his voice hard with determination. “But that selkie doesn’t deserve to be bound to you, nor to lose her skin entirely.”

“She doesn’t?” He’s got to be kidding.

“Of course she doesn’t!” Jaskier breaks in. “What kind of question is that, _Does she not deserve to be enslaved by a malicious, skin-stealing, bard-choking witch?_ ”

Well. They sound in earnest, but then—

“Who did you come here with?” Yennefer demands. Because there’s no way to tell, with those shields—and perhaps that is more _convenient_ than she’d realized.

“The daring, gallant villager who alerted us to this profane injustice, a hero whose identity we shall never betray, lest you hunt them down and—”

“They came here with me.”

The voice comes from the door to the old ballroom—left open, and previously empty. Silhouetted in the dim light is a man: middle-aged, brunet, and _reeking_ of magic.

Yennefer exhales slowly. There are less than a dozen people in the world who know that she is a selkie.

“Stregobor.” She doesn’t bother to hide her displeasure.

In the corner of her eye, Geralt abruptly stiffens. Which only makes sense—everyone knows at least _some_ story of Blaviken.

It appears that Stregobor has found the White Wolf an expedient tool once again.

“Pardon me?” the man says, his peasant’s bowl cut shifting with the tilt of his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.”

Yennefer snorts. “Drop the fucking glamor.”

The man’s lip curls as the face around it fades into one older, wrinklier, and unfortunately familiar.

“Stregobor,” Geralt growls, and the bard’s expression darkens in turn.

“How did you manage to see through my illusion?” Stregobor asks, as if they’re making the customary, backhanded small talk of a thousand official functions. “That one should’ve been undetectable to a far greater mage than yourself.”

Yennefer has retained so few of her people’s teachings, but the ability to see and smell magic is one she will never forget—will never _let_ herself forget, for it is far too vital a tool. The sealfolk are beings of chaos, and while they cannot manipulate it, what abilities they have are as useful as they are unknown to human mages—a fact which Stregobor clearly intends to change.

But Yennefer has no intention of helping him. “Please, as if I needed to bother. You’re as pathetic as you are obvious.”

Stregobor’s sneers have been perfected by centuries of counsel meetings, but Yennefer has seen so, so much worse.

No, she’s not intimidated by Stregobor, whatever he may foolishly expect.

She’s _furious_.

There is only one explanation for the situation—for Stregobor’s presence and disguise, for Geralt’s presence and the shields around his mind, for Jaskier’s shock and Geralt’s insistence that she is _better than this_ : Stregobor is the one trying to steal her skin.

What he wants to do with it—with _her_ , for she shall come along part and inhuman parcel—is easy enough to guess, in the abstract. After all, everyone knows what he did with the daughters of the Black Sun—that each one died only after weeks and months of experimentation.

Unfortunately for Stregobor, Yennefer will be a bit harder to vivisect.

She drops the bonds around Geralt and Jaskier, recoups that power and focus in an instant, and sends a lightning bolt shooting toward Stregobor’s head.

He deflects, the bastard.

But Yennefer is no longer sixteen, striking out in thwarted rage. Already she is following with more and more lightning, summoning shadows out of the walls, and activating the traps that the witcher hadn’t disarmed, the ones that she has laid into the building with her blood.

Stregobor blocks and deflects and shields, and scorch marks stud the wall behind him—some were there before she attacked, evidence of the traps through which Geralt had broken. But the shocks and surges of power strung across magical tripwires are _nothing_ to what Yennefer can summon in person.

What is the point of having an alarm, after all, if you have made no provisions for your arrival?

Stregobor is still fighting back—uses his staff to summon a ball of cold, white light, one that shines out to hold her striking shadows at bay.

But the staff is held in front of him—and he cannot prevent a shadow from being formed by his own body.

Yennefer sends forth another shock of lightning, one Stregobor bats away as he raises his arms to start a summoning—

A distraction. He’s blasting power back at her instead, but Yennefer doesn’t even need to dodge—before she can try, she’s protected by a translucent dome of golden light.

“What do you want, Stregobor?” Geralt demands, his voice tight with the strain of holding off the attack. “No more lies—what were you going to do with that selkie skin?”

Yennefer snorts. “What he always does. Apparently murdering babies grew dull.”

“Ugh,” Jaskier opines. Truly, a master of the linguistic arts.

“Says the sorceress who set all this up,” Stregobor says, letting his attack lapse to gesture at the abandoned manor. “Who’s only here to protect what she herself has stolen, to keep the selkie her prisoner forever.” A low burning, tightening rage builds in Yennefer’s stomach. He’s _really_ going there. “We may have had our differences, Geralt, but you know what the daughters of the Black Sun were capable of. I was protecting people them, from Renfri, from the end of the world—as I am protecting people now, by trying to save an innocent selkie from the sorceress who has held her prisoner for _years_.”

Geralt’s gaze darts back and forth between the two of them, his jaw clenched.

It is Yennefer’s throat that tightens, this time. Stregobor is betting that she won’t reveal herself—and unless a truly elaborate con is happening, that is final proof that Geralt _doesn’t know_ that she’s the selkie.

Relief and rage war in Yennefer’s throat.

Because Stregobor, damn him, is right. She can’t admit the truth—not to anyone, and least of all to someone who has bound her once before.

“Yen,” Geralt says. His voice is almost _daring_ her to explain—but he holds the quen shield up still, even though Stregobor has ceased his attack.

For the moment. Yennefer swallows.

Then she makes the wall behind Stregobor explode.

The shield holds off the dust and debris, but doesn’t prevent the sudden light and noise from making Yennefer flinch—

She looks up the instant she can—

Only to see Stregobor disappearing through the secret passage—he’s running after _her skin_.

“ _Damn_ him,” Yennefer hisses, ignores Geralt’s hand reaching out for her, the way Jaskier jumps back as she takes a step forward.

Stregobor has written his own doom.

Geralt and Jaskier, she supposes, have not.

So she musters her chaos, smiles in anticipation of one of the most _satisfying_ things she will ever do—

Blinks her eyes open against the light of the outdoors sun. Shrugs off Geralt’s hand as it lands on her shoulder, as he growls, “Yen, _stop_ —”

And watches, her smile only growing, as she watches the decrepit old manor explode.

She uses a solid chunk of what little chaos she has left—after that fight and then a portal for three—to anchor herself against the shockwave.

Geralt manages to brace himself, but his bard is not so lucky, and barely avoids ending up on the floor.

“ _Holy_ _fucking shit_ ,” the bard gasps. “Oh ho, what a _ballad_ this will make!”

The old mannor lies in rubble before them, smoldering in a thousand pieces, a half-story high where it had once been three.

A fittingly ignominious grave.

But there are far less pleasant matters to attend to, before she can toast to Stregobor’s untimely demise. “There won’t be a ballad.”

Jaskier snorts—from where he’s absolutely hiding behind Geralt, hand reached out in a clear desire to rest itself on the witcher’s back. “But it has all the makings of one,” Jaskier says, voice incongruously serious. “Magical duels, climactic explosions—and an evil witch tormenting an innocent young maid.”

Yennefer will _not_ dignify that with a response.

But the witcher’s sword, unsheathed during the chaos, raises just an inch.

“The selkie’s coat was in there,” the witcher says pointedly, head tilting toward the flaming ruins.

Then it’s Yennefer’s turn to snort. “I promise you, Geralt, it was not.”

“Oh?” Geralt asks, voice low and flat. “The seal fur I smelled—that was just a trick.”

“And for once,” Yennefer says, throwing her gaze dramatically to the sky, “the witcher gets it!” As if she’d ever set her own skin aflame. Never mind that she hasn’t worn it in decades—she would never. Despite everything, she knew she would never be able to bear to.

Geralt’s eyes narrow. “Then it’ll be easy for you to return it to the woman you stole it from.”

Yennefer’s voice is as frigid when she responds, “There is no woman I stole it from.”

“ _Please—_ ” the bard starts.

“Did you know that Stregobor had built shields around both your minds?” she interrupts.

Not lowering his guard even an inch, Geralt answers, “I didn’t know it was him. But yes.”

“To protect us from the sorceress,” Jaskier adds, voice pointed, “who ensnared a poor, innocent selkie’s mind in order to steal her pelt and force her to make herself a prisoner.”

So _courteous_ of Stregobor to have made arrangements in case of her arrival.

“Please, what would I even want with some random selkie?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time you’d sought out a rare creature to further your own ends,” Geralt says.

Yennefer confines her reaction to a flat stare. “Stregobor is a liar. Accept that he was lying about this too.”

“You kill her?”

Yennefer has moved on, and so has Geralt. The pang in her chest is absurd. “Well,” she says. “If that’s what you think of me, then I don’t suppose there’s any reason to continue this conversation.”

“Yen—”

“I believe I told you not to call me that.”

With a hint of regret, miracle of miracles, Geralt nods. “Yennefer. Sorry.”

“As well you should be,” her voice drawing up into its haughtiest tone.

Her reserves of chaos are running painfully low, but still she scrapes through the weak embers inside her, draws up what magic she can muster, because suddenly, she cannot bear to be there a second longer.

“Yennefer,” Geralt says as the portal flares open. “We’re at the inn in Zadar. I’d—” He swallows. “If there’s another explanation. Please let me hear it.”

Yennefer steps through the portal and refuses to let herself respond.

\--

For a week, Yennefer tells herself not to be stupid. That the witcher has done her the favor of showing her where he stands.

But she can’t keep his face out of her mind—the tightness of his mouth, the conflict in his eyes as he implored that she was _better than this_.

Yennefer lasts a week, and then she portals to Zadar.

\--

It’s foolish, she tells herself again, as she arrives behind the inn and draws a dark hood over her long hair. The witcher might have stayed for a day or two, despite everything, to honor the ridiculous obligation he’d given himself in the heat of the moment, but it’s been a week now, and he will obviously have moved on to more important things—protecting innocent maidens, she’s sure.

So. As soon as she establishes that he is, of course, gone, she can put any fanciful notions of _explanations_ out of her mind, and move on with her life. There are some mages that would dearly pay to know that Stregobor is gone, after all, and she was hardly done making sure the bastard hadn’t told anyone _else_ of her true nature.

It’s with those plans on her mind that she rounds the building to find the inn’s front door—

Only to hear the opening swell of Toss A Coin, in an aggravatingly familiar voice.

So, the witcher is still there, then. That’s…evident.

Perhaps—just maybe—he doesn’t believe the worst of her after all.

Yennefer braces herself and opens the door.

\--

The witcher is easy to see—sitting in the far corner, facing the door, as is his wont. The bard is playing up near the bar, a small crowd of townsfolk around him.

Yennefer has spent most of a week telling herself it would be pointless to take Geralt up on his offer—but nonetheless, she has thought about what she would say.

She still isn’t quite decided, but standing in the door, meeting the gaze of a man she once loved, it is nevertheless a balm to know he hasn’t betrayed her. That his explanation of the wish’s wording and his intentions—given a few months after the disastrous dragon hunt—had been true.

It’s easier than she expected, to talk over to his table. To open her mouth and say, “Somewhere more private, perhaps.”

Geralt gives an affirmative grunt and leads her upstairs. It’s a simple inn, not the kind she’d ever choose for herself, but one she’s passed through before—because after all, Zadar is the town nearest to the manor where she’d laid her trap. The room the witcher leads her into is clearly one he shares with the bard, judging by the very contrasting clothing strewn about—but then, of course they share, now that they’re together.

It’s not something Yennefer feels bitterness over; Geralt may have apologized, for the wish and for his words on the mountain, but she is no longer interested in loving him in that way.

“So,” Geralt says, standing awkwardly across from her.

“So,” Yennefer responds. Because she is not an unmannered heathen, she sits down on the chair in the corner of the room, and gestures for Geralt to sit on the bed.

They sit in silence for a moment, until Geralt, surprisingly, breaks it. “You were right—it would be easy for me to believe that Stregobor had lied. I want him to have lied.”

Yennefer slowly breathes out. “He did. About plenty of things besides his name.”

“You said that the seal fur I smelled was a trick,” Geralt says, voice measured and slow. “Which makes me want to know why.”

With a shrug, Yennefer replies, “Let’s just say I had reason to believe Stregobor and his ilk might be coming.”

“Stregobor and his ilk—but not a selkie?” He sounds like he believes her, almost. He shouldn’t. She’s offered him almost nothing.

“There was no selkie.”

Geralt hums. “Stregobor seemed pretty convinced otherwise.” He sounds…cautious, perhaps. But not accusative.

And damn her, but something about that—about the fact that he had been deceived, that he probably _hadn’t_ lied about the wish, that she probably had been _right_ to believe him—makes her want to throw caution to the wind. She _wants_ him to be worthy of her trust.

Which is how and why the next words come out of her mouth:

“I’m the selkie.”

Geralt starts. “You— Really?”

“Really.”

Somehow, he doesn’t disbelieve her. He does pause, but it’s Geralt—that’s only to be expected. And somehow, it isn’t even a negative pause; he’s thinking, clearly, but there’s no calculation in his eyes, no disgust at knowing he’d laid with someone nonhuman. And none in his mind, either, when she skims the surface, Stregobor’s shields having long since fallen.

“It was… your skin, then,” he says finally. “Stregobor was after you.”

A grimace steals over Yennefer’s face before she even realizes. The thought of what might have happened had she been less paranoid, less prepared, has made the past week even more fraught.

“Hmm,” Geralt says into the silence. “I owe you another apology.”

“Damn right you do,” Yennefer answers on reflex.

“I mean it,” he says. “And not just for falling for Stregobor’s lies, or thinking you would have done what he’d said. When you came and saw me there… I know how that must have looked.”

He is, of course, not wrong.

“I wasn't trying to control you, Yennefer,” Geralt says. “I’m sorry that I was used by someone who was. And I’m sorry for the things I’ve done, that you would believe that of me.”

Yennefer has not lived a life in which apologies are something she often hears. She tells herself that’s why the witcher’s words seem to matter so much.

“Thank you for your apology,” Yennefer says, and is surprised to find out that she means it.

“The wording of the wish…” Geralt adds, brows furrowed. “It wasn’t an attempt to control you either, I swear. I’m still sorry for it. And I know I asked you not to last time, but I’m saying yes now: read my mind if you don’t believe me.”

Yennefer does. Delves in deep. Finds the memory of that day, that wish—and his thoughts when he made it. And she finds that he speaks the truth.

It is an unspoken relief, and she lets her posture speak it instead—lets her muscles loosen, lets herself relax her guard, no longer half-ready to channel magic at a moment’s notice.

“Good,” Yennefer says, and the very corners of her mouth ease up, ever so slightly.

Something in Geralt unclenches as well—but not all the way. “And your cloak—” Geralt begins. Yennefer feels unease start to creep in, but then— “It wasn’t in the fire, right? It’s safe? _You’re_ safe?”

“Yes, Geralt,” she says, and feels a smile fighting to break through. Against all odds: “Yes, I am.”

\--

When Yennefer was seventeen, she had hunted down spell after spell and practiced and mastered them to perfection. She cast them almost a year later: a complex transfiguration, one so delicate and so important that it remained the dearest working she had ever done.

At seventeen, on the cusp of eighteen—the very cusp of adulthood—she watched as her cloak shrunk and thinned before her eyes until it settled on its new form: a small, soft bracelet, near-black, with no closures at all.

From there, it is simple to craft the two glass beads: one as an alarm, and one to cause her cloak to revert. She never intends to use the latter.

The bracelet is so beautiful in its plainness. No one, she knows, will ever suspect. No one will ever lay their hands on her pelt again—no matter what she has to do to keep it that way.

\--

Decades later, she clasps the second bead between her fingers, and—standing on the sand, in front of the low roaring of waves that still sings to something deep inside her—she reaches for her chaos, and orders the spell to release.

**Author's Note:**

> If you love Yennefer as much as I do, consider joining the Witcher femslash discord server--without which this fic would not exist--where we yell about how great all of the witcher ladies are (and how they should kiss). Very open to trans/nonbinary identities (in headcanons and in our members). https://discord.gg/jrn8j3WVtt


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